USPS Fails

I think its pretty common to order online now days. The internet has made purchasing products that get shipped right to your door so easy most gradeschoolers could pull it of. You find what you are looking for and you make the purchase often times not even having to put in a credit card anymore. With a bit of excitement you wait for the your tracking number to pop into your email. Then you get pissed off when it just says “shipping information received” for another day. Eventually it updates and then you get to see the box go from depot to depot until we see the line that says “out for delivery”. Suddenly everything is better. The annoying neighbor that makes you cringe every time you hear her voice and you try to avoid at all costs suddenly has a voice as soothing as Morgan Friedman’s and you just listen in delight as she talks about what her cat mitsy caught and ate in the garden earlier that day. When your boss nags about your work you don’t just moan and give him grief over it. No you listen, you listen and you think of it as constructive criticism and thank him for it when hes done.

You pull up in the drive way. You speedily get out, lock the car, and walk up the door so happy that you could just start dancing right there. Thats when you see this:

You go into a tail wind of emotion. At first its are the contents ok? Then its who kicked, stepped, ripped, smashed, tore, dropped, threw and/or poured a glass of water on my beloved package? How could the delivery man just leave this here like that? Does the courier have any pride what so ever?

The end result whether or not the items inside are damaged no one is happy in this situation. You just might be less happy if it is broken because now you get to wait a couple more weeks if the shipping company process the mistake properly. Otherwise it takes even longer if not never.

At work receive packages daily and while most of the harm is most likely done not by the person dropping it off, but somewhere earlier in the line, the people doing the drop off can make mistakes too. Just last week I watched an employee stack 5 boxes on a dolly in front of my store. When he went to move dolly all the boxes fell off and on to the ground. He dropped 5 of my boxes right in front of me. He said nothing, just picked them up and brought them in. Nothing was damaged but some kind of apology would have been nice and it never came as he asked for my signature. This company was ontrack for anyone curious.

The end result of the package in the photo (yes this is my personal package that USPS lovingly dropped off at my house) was that most things were fine. There was a tile inside that did have a chip on the corner but I can live with it for what I’m using it for. The hassle of getting an exchange outweigh the chip. This one really struck an off chord with me because USPS knew what they did.

They tried to fix it by putting a piece of tape over where the tile was sticking out. After physically assaulting my package the chipped tile extruded through the side of the cardboard. They could see what they did was wrong, that the tile was chipped and their response was too put a piece of tape over it and not say anything. I would have been less pissed off if there was some kind of note saying something like “We apologize that your order was damaged during shipment, please check the contents and let us know if there is anything we can do”. Even a note written in crayon that simple states “I am sorry” would take a bit of the edge off, but that is not their way.

Have you ever had a package damaged in shipping or a poor shipping experience? Let us know about it in the comments below